
Qass__ 

Book 



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Cfjc BDcatJ) of president Lincoln. 



A SERMON 



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PREACHED IN SAINT PAUL'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK, ON 
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1'.), 1865. 



Rev" MORGAN DIX, S. T. D., 



RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH. 



PRINTKI) BY ORDF.R OF TI1F. VKSTUY. 




CAMBRIDGE: 

PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS. 

1865. 



€l)t £Dcati) of JPrcstifcicM Hincoin. 



A SERMON 



PREACHED IN SAINT PAUL'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK, ON 
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 18G5. 



Rev* MORGAN DIX, S. T. D. 
t < 

KECTOE OF TRINITY CHURCH. 




FEINTED BY OEDER OF THE VESTIiY. 



CAMBRIDGE: 

PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS. 

1865. 






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RESOLUTIONS 

ADOPTED BY THE VESTRY OF TRINITY CHURCH. 



Upon receiving the news of the assassination of 
the President, the Vestry assembled, on the call of 
the Rector of the Parish, at 3 o'clock, r. m., on Sat- 
urday, April loth, and adopted, unanimously, the fol- 
lowing preamble and resolutions : — 

Whereas, on the evening of the 14th day of April, 1865, 
being Good Friday, by an assassin as yet unknown, the ven- 
erated and beloved President of the United States, Abraham 
Lincoln, was suddenly assaulted and slain ; and whereas the 
announcement of that appalling crime has just been made to 
this community, filling all hearts with a grief, astonishment, 
and indignation which cannot be described ; and whereas this 
Vestry has been called together by the Rector, to take such 
action as in their judgment may seem fit and becoming; 
therefore, — 

Resolved, That this Vestry, as sharers in the common dis- 
tress and affliction, unite in the public lamentation over the 
untimely death of the honored Chief Magistrate of the Union, 
and shocked beyond measure at the intelligence which has 
just been received, remain without words adequate to express 
their sorrow. 

Resolved, That we recognize in this calamitous event one 
of those visitations, permitted by Almighty God, before which 



4 RESOLUTIONS. 

a nation can but bow in silence and awe, with the prayer 
that they may be overruled for the good of our country. 

Resolved, That while we regard the act by which our be- 
loved country has thus been, through indescribable malice 
and fury, plunged into the deepest affliction, as one of those 
crimes of which no language can adequately paint the atroc- 
ity, of which the history of Europe has not for many centu- 
ries furnished a parallel, of which our own history has thus 
far furnished no example, and than which no history furnishes 
a more detestable and infamous act to the view, we cannot 
but hold it to have been dictated by the spirit which, from 
the commencement of our national troubles, has sympathized 
with the enemies of the public peace, and aided and abetted 
the rebellion, now, as we trust, subdued ; a spirit whose ten- 
dencies and essential character had previously been manifested 
in the July riots in this city, in 1863, in the attempt to de- 
stroy this city by incendiarism, in November last, and in the 
systematic outrages inflicted on our captured soldiers in the 
prisons of the South. 

Resolved, That this Vestry hereby record their tribute of 
respect to the memory of the late President with profound 
sorrow for his loss, recognizing in him a singleness of pur- 
pose, an honesty of intention, an ardent patriotism, a fidelity 
to duty, and a growing mastery of the circumstances of his 
position, which enabled him, under Providence, to fulfil and 
bring to successful completion a work almost unprecedented 
for difficulty; and that in his removal, at the moment in which 
the labors of his last four years had culminated in the tri- 
umph of the national authority and the evident approach of 
the blessings of peace, we see the completion of a career 
which the nation will ever look back to with thankfulness, 
and hold in affectionate and tender remembrance. 

Resolved, That the Rector be requested to take order that 
the churches of this parish be draped in mourning, in token 
of our sympathy with the distress and anguish which have 
been caused throughout the length and breadth of the land 



RESOLUTIONS. 5 

by the murder of our venerated and beloved Chief Magis- 
trate. 

Resolvad, That the Rector be authorized to give such pub- 
lication to the above Resolutions as he may deem expedient ; 
also Resolved, That an attested copy of the same be sent to 
the family of the deceased, and to the Department of State at 
Washington. 

On Wednesday, April 19th, 1865, in compliance 
with the recommendation of the National Govern- 
ment, funeral solemnities were held, at 12 o'clock 
meridian, throughout the United States, in honor 
of the late President. The following Sermon was 
preached in St. Paul's Chapel on that occasion. 



SERMON. 

' He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. 
And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even 
a morning without clouds ; as the tender grass springing out of the earth 
by clear shining after rain." — 2 Samuel xxiii. 3, 4. 

These were the last words of David. He spake 
them as he saw the time drawing near when he 
must go the way of all the earth ; they were the 
last song of the Psalmist. Each man knows best 
the law of his own profession ; he, as a ruler, knew 
what a ruler ought to be, and delivered his judgment 
on that subject before he died. The sentence on his 
own performances he left his Lord to utter ; but the 
general law by which he ought to have guided his 
course, he was moved so to state and express in the 
moment in which the rod of empire was about to be 
taken from his relaxing hand. 

Those words of David, the ancient king, may be 
most aptly used as proper to a description of the 
dead President. We assemble to-day on an occasion 
without a precedent in our past history. There has 
been, on this side of the world, no sorrow like our 
sorrow, so far as we can read back the history of the 
men who have dwelt here. Regarded in its cause 
and in its manner of manifestation, it stands beyond 



SERMON. 7 

comparison in its awful grandeur. By that act, to 
which the sober judgment of mankind has awarded 
the crown in degrees of atrocious crime ; by that 
deed, of which language fails to paint the infamy; 
by that sin, against which Christian civilization cries 
out as involving the reversal of all progress towards 
good, and as throwing back mankind into the slough 
of barbarism, the act, the crime, the sin of murderous 
assassination, a man has been laid low, who held in 
his hands the destinies of twenty-five millions of his 
countrymen, and to whom they were at that moment 
looking with growing confidence in his honesty of 
purpose, his integrity of character, and his ability to 
do his duty in that position unto which it had pleased 
God to call him. And we are gathered together to 
mourn and weep with all those millions over a be- 
reavement which every lover of his country feels to 
be personal to himself. There is a great cry through- 
out the land ; it seems as though there was not a 
house where there is not one dead. Some few words 
would I reverently speak at this hour, when, perhaps, 
a solemn silence might better suit the occasion. 

And first, of him who has been wrested from us 
by the murderer's hand. That sanguinary fiend, that 
nocturnal demon of the darkness of this world, 
thought to have done him a harm when he lifted 
up the weapon against his life. How short-sighted 
are the calculations of the wicked one ! That act 
has been, not the destruction, but the immortalizing 
of the venerated and beloved victim. When or 
where, at any time, in any age, has a man gone to 
his grave as this ruler of the land is going to his, this 



8 SERMON. 

hour ? Who ever saw or dreamed of a manifestation 
of sorrow, of anguish, of interest, of devotion to one 
human being like that which this hour is revealing ? 
Unforced, unasked, the result of no national edict, of 
no proclamation by authority, it is the simple, un- 
affected, real demonstration of the heart of this great 
family of freemen. There is a grandeur in this scene 
with which no occurrence hitherto can compare. Let 
the blood-stained felon, wherever he be now skulk- 
ing, mark what he has done. He thought to spread 
dismay and confusion through the land. He has but 
lifted a veil which lay upon the great national heart, 
and shown the world its greatest strength and glory, 
in its tenderness, its veneration for goodness, its mag- 
nificent collectedness and self-control. His infamous 
deed has made stronger than ever the people whom 
he hates ; stronger, as they are stronger who have 
been knit together by the bond of a common afflic- 
tion. The sound of the funeral hymn, now sternly 
ascending over the whole land, bespeaks a compact- 
ness, a concentration, a mutual devotion, which, up 
to this hour, lacked the lever of development and 
the cause of expression ; this funeral wail has in it 
the music of a coming era, through which the dead 
of to-day shall walk in spirit, canonized and glorified 
in the undying love and veneration of coining ages. 
Just as the French look back to the good Henry IV., 
and love him for the fate which brutal passion in- 
flicted, so will the American people, to their remotest 
generations, speak tenderly and reverently of that 
good, that honest, that kindly-hearted man, their six- 
teenth President. 



SERMON. 9 

" He that ruleth over man must be just, ruling in 
the fear of God." How fairly do these words de- 
scribe him. Who was just, if he was not ? or who, 
if we may read the man's inmost heart from his 
words, did ever rule more conscientiously in the fear 
of God ? Honesty and his name were synonymous ; 
and now that he is dead, what more could he ask, 
what nobler record, than that he was proverbially 
the honest man ? And then, how tender-hearted ; 
men thought at last almost too much so ; but let us 
rather think of that grand, Christ-like trait with 
thankfulness, that it beamed forth so brightly from 
his person at the last. When they struck him down 
he was meditating how to do them good ; his last 
official acts were acts of kindness and leniency, so 
marked as to excite, in some quarters, alarm ; in him 
they murdered their best friend ; his heart was full 
of plans of conciliation at the moment when they 
aimed at it their execrable blow. That is enough for 
every lover of peace to make him look, with moist- 
ened eyes, at that untimely grave. There lieth one 
who, so far as we can judge, bore no ill-will to any 
creature that lives ; who, as he said himself when 
they told him that he was reelected, felt sorry to 
triumph over any one ; who was seeking, in those 
his last few days, to find how he might soften to the 
enemies of his country the circumstances of their 
late disastrous defeats, — how he could save them 
mortification and humiliation, — how much he could 
safely give them back of that which they had for- 
feited ; who would, I think, have pardoned, if it 
came to the last, even the chief man of the insur- 
2 



I 



10 SERMON. 

gents ; who would have had the blood of no one on 
his hands ; and who, if he knew in those last hours 
what had happened to him, and who had done it, 
would, I verily believe, have prayed for his mur- 
derer, and been ready to do what no one else can 
do — forgive him. Oh, if there be a crime more 
foul, more base, more abominable, than that which 
has been done on that unostentatious, wise, kind- 
hearted, friendly man, let it be named, that we may 
see in the scale of wickedness one degree below any 
yet known! The people know of nothing worse, 
and, therefore, is he lamented as none was ever 
lamented for by them unto this day. 

Whither can the assassin fly ? Whither, that the 
justice of Heaven shall not fell him ? Whither, that 
the arm of the government cannot lay hold of him ? 
This is a case in which there need be no impatience, 
no hurry. The retribution may be deferred ; but it 
will come. The whole earth has not a place where 
he cannot be known and followed and found. The 
government does not exist which dare refuse to give 
him up, if he be within its limits. Only one part of 
the world is there to-day where he can breathe and 
walk abroad in safety — in those parts of this country 
still in an insurgent condition, and not yet reached 
by our armies. But around that lessening region 
the circle hourly contracts. He shall not long have 
shelter there ; the years at last shall bring him into 
our hands, if the months and the days do not do it 
sooner. There is small consolation in the thought ; 
the evil cannot be repaired. But that man owes a 
debt to the nation, and sooner or later the hour of 






SERMON. 11 

its payment will come. Meanwhile we have but to 
be patient and follow. 

Among the thoughts which come upon the mind 
at such a moment as this, is one of which I will 
briefly and dispassionately speak. One consequence 
of this ghastly crime will be, and is already, that an 
entire population is put on trial before the bar of the 
opinion of mankind. It has been urged by many — 
by most — that this act of assassination is but the 
natural result of a social condition to which such 
acts seem properly to belong. It is said that the 
moral and social tone, temper and spirit of the South- 
ern people are such that acts of infamy like this 
might naturally be expected from them. But there 
are others who cannot consent to such a view of the 
case; who claim for Southern civilization a higher 
tone, a better spirit ; who maintain that its princi- 
ples are the principles of Christianity, and that the 
moral condition of the people is not below that 
of the rest of civilized mankind. To that opinion 
your preacher has adhered. He could not feel that 
a whole people could have been so brutalized, so 
degraded, as it has been represented that they are. 
But now the thing is to be determined — the truth 
is to be made plain — in the red and bloody light of 
this cruel and diabolical outrage. There can be no 
escape from this test, nor any evasion of the issue. 
By the calm, concurrent, and deliberate judgment of 
civilized and enlightened nations, assassination is 
held to be a crime — an act which no circumstances 
can excuse. That was not the Pagan view. The 
change in opinion on this point has come with the 



12 SERMON. 

acceptance of the teachings of Jesus Christ, and with 
the spread of His religion through the world. To 
defend assassination is no more possible in this age 
than to defend suicide ; no more possible on Chris- 
tian principles ; it is classed among those frightful 
enormities with which lower civilizations teem, and 
to which men are more or less prone in proportion 
to their higher or lower position in the scale of ad- 
vancement. Hence we have heard, wherever this 
deed has been made known beyond our borders, a 
cry of horror, a cry of detestation from all official 
mouths — from all who could speak for constituen- 
cies. We have heard that cry from those who have 
never been on our side, and who do not yet alter 
their feelings concerning us ; but as men, and as 
Christians, they think it due to their manhood and 
their faith to express, in language not to be misun- 
derstood, their horror at the sudden appearance of 
that barbarian shape, the political assassin, amid the 
lights of this age. For two hundred and fifty-five 
years such a dire shape has not emerged from the 
outer darkness to alarm and astound the world. 
Since a. d. 1610, no ruling sovereign of a mighty peo- 
ple has actually thus been hurried out of the world. 
Have we not, therefore, in this event a test which 
no ingenuity can evade of the real temper, tone, and 
quality of that community with which we have been 
forced into contention ? We wait to hear what they 
will say. They must speak, and the whole world 
will listen to every word they utter. He who in- 
vaded the family circle of the President and did him 
to death ; he who, with a dastardly cowardice which 



SERMON. 13 

must simply be pronounced immense, entered the 
chamber of that sick and helpless man, the Secretary 
of State, and stabbed him in his bed, — these wretches 
knew not all that they did ; for among the results of 
those ferocious actions was this, — that they have 
arraigned the whole Southern people before the bar 
of the opinion of mankind, and put them on trial at 
that august tribunal. The judgment is set, and the 
books are opened ; Christian civilization waits atten- 
tively to hear them speak. There is but one thing 
to do, if they would stand in this audit. To de- 
nounce the act, to join in the common cry against 
the outrage done to God, to man, to Christ, to the 
age ; to disclaim any responsibility for it ; to shrink 
back from the bloody actors in that murder ; to say, 
We, too, are Christians, civilized beings, men ; we 
abhor as much as you can a deed like this ; charge 
it not on us ; it is the work of desperadoes for whom 
we are not accountable : think not of us as though 
we would excuse or defend a crime fit only for a bar- 
barous zone, and from which, with the enlightened 
world, and as acceptors of the principles of Christi- 
anity, we equally with yourselves revolt in disgust 
and horror. Such must be their answer, if their 
claims be true. And would to God it miffht come 
back to us from the other side in unmistakable 
terms, — a full, clear, hearty, manly voice, — assuring 
us that the weapons of their warfare are and ever 
will be those of honorable, though, as we deem, mis- 
taken, men, and not the poisoned chalice, the mid- 
night torch, the secret dagger, the muffled pistol. 
Then might good come even of this awful catas- 



14 SERMON. 

trophe. We, loving the dead as we do, they, horror- 
stricken at his murder, might yet join hands over his 
bloody grave, and ask forgiveness of God and of each 
other in whatsoever, all through these years, we 
have done amiss. Would to God it might be so ; 
the blood of the martyr might indeed make fertile 
the ground of that country, all parts of which he 
loved. But I fear, I tremble lest it should be other- 
wise, lest we shall hear some quite different voice, 
perhaps a brutal cry of approval, perhaps a glorify- 
ing of the act even more monstrous than the deed 
itself; for he who could calmly and in cold blood 
justify it, must be at heart like those who did it ; 
and if that sullen response should come, if those 
assassins should be received as heroes, their crime 
applauded, their persons admired, the judgment of 
mankind defied, — if such should be the answer, then, 
of a truth, must the heart grow heavier than it is 
now, and a thoughtful man must ask himself, " What 
are those people ? What is their normal state ? 
What are their thoughts — their principles? What 
cause has been at work to keep them back behind 
the rest of the world, to depress them, to hold them 
at the old heathen positions, at the old standpoints 
of Paganism, to keep them blind while all the rest 
of the world sees ? What is that civilization which 
appropriates and glories in deeds like this, which 
calls the midnight murderer a hero, the stealthy 
killer of the old, the sick, the defenceless, a demi- 
god ? Is it a work of this age ? or is it a thing of 
the past? Is it a system which rests on Gospel 
principles and Christian ideas ? or is it a remnant 



SERMON. 15 

of hard old Roman Paganism and an ally and friend 
of the Thugs? And can there be peace while any 
vestige remains of those peculiarities, whatever they 
may be, which make that system what it is, and, 
under it, debase and distort those people from the 
very form of man ? " Brethren, it is with indescrib- 
able anxiety that many are now waiting for the re- 
sponse of the Southern people to these atrocious 
murders which have been committed in their name. 
We will not think the worst until all hope is gone ; 
we will yet hope against hope. But if it must be 
so, then, indeed, will it seem as if all hope were at an 
end — as if all that has been said were just — as if 
the charges hitherto made had not been rash ; and, 
so far as defence of that community is regarded, im- 
partial lips must be silent henceforth. 

A few words in conclusion. I return to my subject, 
to him whose memory we honor to-day, for whom we 
make loud and bitter lamentation. But he is beyond 
the reach of our cry ; he is not, however, beyond 
that of our praise. His name is with us — in our 
households, on our national annals, on the roll of the 
world's prominent men, and in the heart of a great 
nation while that nation shall endure. I do not 
enumerate his amazing successes in guiding the ship 
of state through as heavy a storm as ever beat and 
blew ; in leading us to conclusions of the most won- 
derful character, as official commander-in-chief of the 
power of the nation ; in emancipating from the fet- 
ters of slavery an entire race of human beings. Let 
the historian write of all these things in his account 
of that remarkable man. Let me rather repeat the 



16 SERMON. 

words of King David, spoken concerning the just 
ruler that ruleth in the fear of God : — For " he shall 
be as the Jight of the morning when the sun riseth, 
even a morning without clouds ; as the tender grass 
springing out of the earth by clear shining after 
rain." To him, with wonderful accuracy, as we trust, 
may these words be applied. The rebellion is nearly 
over ; the sun of peace will soon, we trust, be bright 
over all the land, and a new and grand era is com- 
mencing for our country. But the good and honest 
President will ever stand there, in the memory of the 
people, surrounded with the light of that morning in 
which, just as it was rising upon us, he was called to 
his rest ; and his name will be, in the hearts of the 
American people, as green, as fresh, and as pleasant 
as is to the eyes the tender grass springing out 
of the earth by clear shining after the rain. Alas ! 
that rain was the rain of his own blood — the blood 
of his active brain, of his generous heart ; but there 
is already a great and clear shining upon the earth 
where that red shower fell ; and, while the lights of 
martyrdom and sacrifice shall continue to shine, they 
will rest on that venerable place, and glow there, 
like sacred fires, from generation to generation. 



_B S '12 



